How the Sun Shone

Read in precincts high and low, this New York paper has been a model for journalists.

It has been a newspaper whose front page carried photographs of great works of art, muckraking exposes, and not infrequently the paper’s confident editorials. In its six-and-a-half year run, the New York Sun achieved the status any newspaper seeks: It was read in precincts high and low, and it was read every day.

Today amid financial difficulties, the paper’s grand run is ending. Seth Lipsky, the newspaperman who was its founder and editor and also a long-time former Wall Street Journal colleague, knew from the start that New York’s media market was crowded, and that any new entrant faced a challenging future. He believed that a broadsheet that focused on local issues, such as political corruption and taxes, but also brought an erudite sensibility to its arts and books coverage (without political correctness), could fill a niche that the local competition tended to ignore. It might have worked had the daily not launched into the toughest headwinds that have ever faced the newspaper business. Read the rest…